Heike Herrmann Tross 🇺🇦

At this point just taking it one day at the time, pushing to stay positive & trust. A kind heart can never be overrated, & love is not a weakness. Cheers!

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

Learned something about Bees Today.

A male bee mates for less than 5 seconds in midair.

The ejaculation is so explosive you can hear it pop from a few feet away.

His body rips in half.

He falls dead before hitting the ground.

And he is one of the lucky males in the hive. When a male bee, called a drone, chases down a queen mid-flight at speeds of 22 miles per hour, his entire reproductive organ turns inside out.

The pressure required for this comes from nearly all the blood in his body, which rushes downward to force the organ outward like a spring. The semen fires into the queen with so much force it makes the audible pop.

The organ then snaps off and stays lodged inside her like a cork. As he flips backward off her body, his abdomen rips open. The next drone waiting his turn has to physically yank out the dead male's cork before he can mate. The same thing then happens to him.

The queen does this 12 to 20 times in a single afternoon. She flies up to a spot in the sky that beekeepers call a drone congregation area.

Picture an invisible meeting point about 50 to 130 feet above the ground where up to 11,000 male bees from as many as 240 different hives are hovering, waiting for her.

These spots stay in the exact same locations year after year, sometimes for over a decade. No one fully understands how brand new drones, born only weeks earlier, find them.

By the end of her mating run, the queen has collected around 100 million sperm cells. She keeps only 5 to 6 million in a tiny internal storage organ that keeps them alive for years.

From that supply, she uses just two sperm cells per egg for the rest of her life, laying up to 2,000 eggs a day for 2 to 7 years. After that one afternoon in the sky, she will never mate again.

A 2019 study from UC Riverside, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Western Australia found that bee semen contains toxic proteins that temporarily blind the queen by interfering with how vision genes function in her brain.

If she can't see well, she can't fly out again to mate with more males. Their semen also carries a separate protein that attacks and kills sperm cells from rival drones still inside her. The males keep competing long after every one of them is dead.

The 99.9% of drones who never get to mate have it worse.

As autumn arrives, the female worker bees in the hive stop feeding their brothers, then drag them out of the entrance after biting off their wings.

The drones can't fly back in.

They starve or freeze in the grass within days.

The colony raises a fresh batch of disposable males the next spring, and the whole cycle starts over.

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

The greatest living mathematician just said something that reframes the entire AI debate (Save this).

Terence Tao, Fields Medal winner, UCLA professor, and by most measures the most accomplished pure mathematician alive speaking at an OpenAI Forum event in March 2026, and the observation he made is deceptively simple but profound in its implications.

"We lived in a world with cognitive friction until very recently, where every task required us to use our brain. So we didn't really think about it, we just thought this was the cost of doing something intellectual. But now we have AI and the other technologies that can bring these frictions down to zero."

To understand why this matters so much, you have to understand what most research time actually looks like.

Most research time is spent checking cases, chasing references, translating intuition into computation, testing a path, finding it false, and deciding whether the failure taught you anything useful.

As Tao puts it the lower cost of exploration that AI enables means he can now try crazier things and that makes all the difference.

The reason unconventional ideas in science are often abandoned is because the bookkeeping, coding, or literature search needed to even test them is too expensive for what is ultimately just a hunch.

This is where cognitive friction becomes scientific friction, and lowering it does not make taste, judgment, or proof disappear, it makes more weak signals cheap enough to inspect before they are abandoned.

AI is making hesitation less expensive, and that is often where discovery begins.

Tao now uses AI to search literature, write code, make plots and figures, run calculations, and test whether a possible approach is even worth chasing and he declared AI ready for primetime in March 2026 after confirming that in math and theoretical physics, it now saves more time than it wastes.

He had previously called early AI models mediocre but not entirely inept graduate students and then watched as they passed the threshold where the value of acceleration exceeded the cost of correction.

Years ago, Tao predicted that 2026-level AI, when used properly, will be a trustworthy co-author in mathematical research and by his own assessment this year, that prediction came in on schedule.

A 23-year-old used ChatGPT to solve Erdős Problem #1196 , a problem that had gone unsolved for 60 years in just over 80 minutes.

OpenAI's GPT-5.2 Pro resolved another open Erdős problem, with OpenAI President Greg Brockman posting about it in January 2026.

And OpenAI's Chief Research Officer Mark Chen articulated the institutional goal in terms that every investor should internalize, "We care less about winning a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal, and more about enabling 100 mathematicians out there to do that for themselves."

If AI is genuinely collapsing the cost of scientific exploration not just in mathematics but in drug discovery, materials science, climate modeling, and theoretical physics then the companies building the compute infrastructure that makes that acceleration possible are not just selling chips and cloud capacity.

They are selling the raw material of compounding human discovery, and that is a demand curve with no visible ceiling

[SWISSGEAR @SWISSGEAR]

Win a ski trip to Switzerland 🇨🇭

Enter now via the link in our bio + @SWISSGEAR on IG.

See official rules for eligibility and full terms.
#SwissgearSweepstakes

[Rick ☆ @RickChapterTwo]

My dad left my mom for another woman on Christmas Eve when I was eight years old. This left my mom with three boys to raise.

There was a small grocery store in our neighborhood owned by Mr. Thomas. My parents actually stopped at his store while bringing me home from the hospital and he weighed me on his butcher scales. When he heard that my dad had left, he set my mom up with a small charge account which she promptly paid on or paid off every payday. It allowed us kids to walk to the store and buy that baloney, milk, cat food or even cigarettes for my mom without having a penny in our pocket.

As I got older, my brother worked for Mr. Thomas. He found out that Mr. Thomas and his wife were "accidentally" losing some of my mom's charge slips, which were just pieces of paper in a file. I later realized that this could be why we got a toy for Christmas or a new pair of pants every now and then.

When I turned 19, I found out that Mr. Thomas was going to die soon. I made a point to go to his house and visit with him. I told him that I knew what he and his wife did to help my mom. He seemed embarrassed but humbly admitted to it. I walked over to his bed and hugged him for what seemed like several minutes. We were both crying at the end of it.

But I never got a chance to tell him how much of a foundation that set for me for the rest of my life.

I guess what I'm saying is that one kind action, one you have no idea is being observed, can change a person's life. And you don't even know it unless someone tells you.

That's it. End of story.

[Heike Herrmann Tross 🇺🇦 @htheike77]

https://t.co/GZmmvpZndU

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

I recently met with some bright young men from our @MBK_Alliance programs in Chicago and Newark who had the chance to go on a cultural exchange in Brazil. It was a life changing experience – and a reminder of why it’s so important to invest in our young people and give them a chance to experience different cultures and broaden their own understanding.

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

Here's a direct link to a living version of the chart, if anyone wants to embed it, graph image files, download the data, etc.
https://t.co/ukAAOt4Ypx

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

1. Trump's tax cuts overwhelmingly help the rich
2. His spending cuts are targeted at the poor
3. Tariffs cost the poor a larger share of their income

Roll these three regressive policies together and you get the largest redistribution from poor to rich in American history.

[Jeff Stein @jstein_star]

Full story:

https://t.co/1aRxr62OE7

[Jeff Stein @jstein_star]

Tax nerds —>

“This is not you and me opening a hotel or a tourist business. This is about a global financial capital firm shifting services and profit to the Virgin Islands”

“I have no idea why this is in the bill … My guess is it’s a U.S. company or two, with foreign competitors, that want a lower tax burden.”

“It seems like a windfall, rather than a fix to a glitch.”

[Jeff Stein @jstein_star]

SCOOP: The House tax bill includes a carve out sought behind the scenes by a $75 billion private credit giant

The firm is owned by billionaire brothers Lawrence & David Golub, who have given $2 million in campaign contributions since 2020

The provision, an exemption to a global minimum tax related to the Virgin Islands, will cost the US close to $1 billion

Experts of the left & right tell me they are baffled by the public policy purpose of the change & worry it will fuel profit shifting out of the US

Golub's affiliate paid lobbyists +$500K to get the exemption from Congress, which also enjoyed support from the Virgin Islands government

[Heike Herrmann Tross 🇺🇦 @htheike77]

@vtbirkenstock @JohnSmithBorder @acnewsitics @xtrends4u @grok

[Heike Herrmann Tross 🇺🇦 @htheike77]

@JohnSmithBorder @acnewsitics @xtrends4u @grok

[VoteVets @votevets]

"There is an actual war against Veterans by a current sitting administration... Never again will a Veteran trust a Republican that says I'm going to be there for you after you get me elected." -Kyle Lewis, U.S. Navy Veteran

Trump cut our care. Fired us. Lied about us. Now he parades Troops to celebrate himself.

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

While Trump admin officials grovel to every utterance that oozes from the little gargoyle mouth of a Russian dictator, let's remember what real Americans once were.

D-Day veteran gets choked up meeting Zelensky, "You're the savior of the people".

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Gavin Newsom responds:

“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles, not because there’s a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle. Don’t give them one. Never use violence. Speak out peacefully.”

[Acyn @Acyn]

Kayyem: Active duty Marines for this? I mean, we were just reporting on it. There's music. The traffic is moving. Most people in L.A. probably don't even know that this is going on. It's such a big, city, and we need an administration that's not going to get to defcon one every time they see something on TV they don’t like

[Win the Era @WinEraPolitics]

@Chromium0071 @Acyn Not true. They were throwing back the things ICE had already thrown at them.

https://t.co/29zKBusEy6

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

Congratulations to @CocoGauff for an amazing championship at the French Open — the first American singles champion at @RolandGarros in a decade. You make us all proud.

[Heike Herrmann Tross 🇺🇦 @htheike77]

@PrimeVanguardX @allenanalysis Yes, their parents & grandparents had been born in Italy, Ireland, Poland, etc, etc. But please, do go on lol

The US born citizens of immigrants nowadays you do not want to see as citizens. Otherwise, I would say, it is already happening, give another decade or so, and Voila!